


Holding

by stars_and_candles



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: But Mostly Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, PTSD, Post-Timeskip, brief mentions of death/blood in flashback
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:56:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29685021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stars_and_candles/pseuds/stars_and_candles
Summary: The Tragedy of Duscar still haunts Dimitri. It comes to him in moments of silence, and in flashback nightmares, even when he's with his boyfriends. They understand, though, and are both willing to comfort him. Sometimes it's nice to just have people who understand.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Holding

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to @PlantBoyCharms on here for helping to beta this!

He could still see their faces, their blood dripping down their necks; there was no way around it. The more he looked at them, the more rage built within him. His parents. Glenn. Dedue. He looked down and saw it on his hands, crimson and staining in a way he couldn’t ever clean. They were all on him, weren’t they? Their deaths, their blood - they were his now. And he had to carry them everywhere he went. Through every step of his life, every swing of a weapon, every choice he made, they would be watching him. Judging him. He’d feel it in each crack of a joint from old injuries. They could’ve done better, if they had survived instead of him. 

Dimitri woke with a start, finding himself midway through falling off of the edge of the bed. Technically it was Felix’ bed, but the edge was his for the moment. And then it seemed the floor was, as well. He felt over himself for injuries, watching his partners shift in their bed through blurry eyes.  _ Blurry eyes?  _ He ran a hand over both eyes, and each was wet. When he did it again, they were just as damp. Sylvain was the first person he saw, sitting up in the middle, his bright hair barely distinguishable in the dark room. He heard Felix flop down onto the bed, and then shifting as he sat up again.

“Dimitri?” Felix called quietly. “We really need a bigger bed,” he muttered.

“I’m here, I just fell,” he replied. Despite trying to sound nonchalant, he could hear the unevenness of his own voice.

“Are you hurt?” Sylvain shuffled out of the bed, carefully stepping over him and crouching beside him. 

Dimitri shook his head. “It’s not that far of a fall,” he managed to say. He felt Sylvain’s hands on him and let himself be guided back into the bed, this time to the middle between his two partners. 

“What’s wrong then, boar?” Felix asked, gently reaching out and running a hand through Dimitri’s hair. The elastic that usually tied some of it back had fallen out again in the middle of the night - he had no doubt that they’d find it in the blankets or on the floor, or possibly kicked under the bed again, when the morning came. For now, though, debating with his boyfriend about the purpose of doing something that always fell apart wasn’t what Felix wanted to do. 

Dimitri shrugged. He had wanted to try to reassure both of them that he was fine, but he knew it was futile. The nickname - once an insult, now affectionate - didn’t help strengthen his resolve to ignore his problems. They just ended up fucking him later, it seemed. “Just another bad dream.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Sylvain offered, gently pulling the blankets back over them. 

“It’s late, we don’t-” Dimitri started.

“I didn’t ask what time it was,” Sylvain interrupted gently. “Do you want to talk about it, or do you just want us to comfort you?”

Dimitri thought about it, and his chest grew tight. “What can I say?” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

Felix pressed a kiss to Dimitri’s forehead before sliding down so that he was lying next to him, facing him. “Whatever you need to,” he said. “Or don’t say anything.”

“Yeah.” Sylvain wrapped an arm around Dimitri’s waist, his chest pressed to the other man’s back. “We’re here.”

Dimitri could feel his thin sheet of almost-composure cracking, and when he felt Felix’s hand reach out and entwine with his, it broke. He knew logically that it was for the best; he couldn’t keep locking things away, not the way he used to, not like when he felt like a walking corpse. Not with two people who made him feel so full of life on either side of him. But in the moment, it still felt like he was failing at some self-imposed destiny. He sobbed as Felix smoothed out his hair again, as Sylvain rubbed his side. “I failed them.” His words were choked. “I failed them all, and I can’t go back and fix it.” He cried until no more tears came and all he could do was shake and catch his breath. Felix squeezed his hand, slowly letting go before squeezing again, repeating until Dimitri’s breath evened out to match it.

“You didn’t fail them,” Sylvain said. “No more than either of us did. And you didn’t fail us, either.” He found Dimitri’s free hand, holding it loosely while he ran his other hand through the blond hair in front of him as best as he could. 

“Then why do I feel like I did?” Dimitri’s brow was still deeply furrowed, his voice now slightly hoarse. 

“I don’t know,” Sylvain said. 

Felix managed to find the hands that his boyfriends were holding each other with and gently brought them to his lips, kissing the spot where they met each other before returning them. Dimitri sighed quietly, wishing he could just put how he felt into words that would make sense. But how could he explain that he felt like he had failed Felix through being the sole survivor of what took his brother's life, and the life of his own parents? How it felt like it was his fault that Glenn died, that Felix and Rodrigue had a falling out? Even thinking of how to put it into words felt ridiculous - he knew it wasn’t logical.  _ They wouldn’t laugh at me, but they’d wish that they could. It’s not my fault. They’d tell me it isn’t my fault. It isn’t my fault. It isn’t.  _

“Mitri.” Felix gave another kiss to Dimitri’s forehead and rubbed the back of his hand with his thumb. “You’re thinking a lot.”

Dimitri pressed into Felix’s lips, doing his best to relax his face. “I have to,” he said. “I can’t forget.”

“You won’t,” Sylvain said. “Not torturing yourself about it won’t make you forget.” He gave what he said a moment more of thought. “Wait, that doesn’t make sense. You aren't remembering them by suffering, you're just remembering pain.”  _ Besides, _ he thinks to himself, knowing he shouldn’t say it out loud,  _ it’s not like you killed them yourself. _ He squeezed Dimitri’s hand. “You’ll still have them with you. That won’t change. But they wouldn’t want you to suffer for them.”

“How do you know?” Dimitri asked, wishing his voice didn’t take on the accusatory tone that it did. 

“How do you know they’d want you to?” Felix shot back.

“It just feels like I  _ should _ .” He felt the familiar creeping urge to run away. “Like any one of them would’ve done better.”

Sylvain started to massage Dimitri’s shoulder, trying to get it to relax again. “It’s okay,” he murmured, “let’s not argue about it.” He shot a pointed look at Felix, practically able to feel it being sent right back to him. 

Dimitri sighed, deflating. He felt Sylvain kiss his shoulder.  _ They don’t want to fight me. They’re just trying to help. I don’t need to be defensive. _ “I’m sorry. It was just a bad dream. I know it doesn’t make sense.”

“Things don’t have to make sense,” Sylvain said. “You can feel them anyways. I think all of us have things like that.”

“I know.”

“So don’t stress over it,” Felix said. “What matters to me is that you’re here, not what would’ve happened if you weren’t.” Sylvain hummed in agreement. “So just… keep being here.”

“Yeah, you don’t have to be alone anymore, so don’t be.” Sylvain squeezed Dimitri’s hand. 

Dimitri managed a weak smile, though it was too dark in the room to really see. “I’ll try my best,” he promised. He took a deep breath in the silence. “Let’s get some sleep. Thank you for… this.”

Sylvain sat up enough to kiss Dimitri’s cheek, smiling and kissing Felix when he sat up, too. “Any time. Night.”

“G’night, boar,” Felix said with a soft kiss. 

Dimitri nodded. “Good night, you two.”

“Felix,” Sylvain said after they had all gotten settled in, “if you steal the blankets from me again I  _ will _ make it your problem.”

Dimitri laughed quietly. He could practically see Sylvain’s face when he said it, preemptively sour about having a cold ass in the morning. He fell asleep with the two of them laughing over tea in his mind, a picture as vivid as any other.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Feel free to comment with requests if you have any.


End file.
